17 million XRB tokens disappeared from the Bitgrail exchange

Bitgrail, a cryptocurrency exchange specializing in trading Nano (previously Railblocks), stopped all operations after losing 17 million XRB, at that time costing about 170 million dollars. The Italian exchange suspended the input and output of XRP two weeks earlier, and customers were already afraid of the worst. The other day the operator of the exchange Francesco Firano (Francesco "The Bomber" Firano) confirmed the bad news, which caused a stormy reaction of the Nano community. Many believe that the owner of Bitgrail carried out a fraudulent operation, stealing almost 13% of the funds from the total number of tokens in circulation.

Cryptocurrency Nano has done an impressive path in the last few months. In early December, 1 XRB could be bought for $ 0.2. A month later, the value of the coin soared to $ 35, thus rising by 17 500%, which was the largest growth rate among the cryptocurrency assets in 2017. For almost a year Bitgrail was the only place where it was possible to acquire XRB. However, after the sharp rise in the price of the coin in December, it began to bargain on other sites, depriving Bitgrail of monopoly.

On January 28, a note appeared on the Exchange's Twitter account: "The introduction and removal of XRB is currently suspended for internal optimization of the system. Thank you for understanding". Then, on February 9, a notice was published, which referred to the theft of 17 million Nano and that theft was reported to law enforcement agencies, and the developers of cryptocurrencies refuse to cooperate with the exchange.

Most users believe that the owners of the exchange deceived them, but representatives of the site claim that there was a break-in. It is assumed that the stolen XRB for several months were transferred from this purse to the Mercatox exchange. There are also rumors that Bitgrail became insolvent after the withdrawal error, which was discovered by some users, and then appeared in Discord and other chat groups, and the balance of the wallet gradually decreased.

One user explained: "There was a bug in the work of Bitgrail, which allowed, when placing two orders, to get a double balance of tokens on their account. Then it was possible to withdraw funds and steal coins. In the end, you had a negative balance, but you could just create a new account. "

In a statement released on February 9, the Nano team wrote: "Now we have good reason to believe that Firano misled the Nano Core team and the community regarding the solvency of the BitGrail exchange for a significant period of time."

Nevertheless, Bitgrail users have virtually no chance to return their cryptocurrency. The Nano team, for obvious reasons, denied Bitgrail's requests for code changes to isolate stolen XRBs.

Only a week ago the Binance Exchange added Nano to its site. After the incident with Bitgrail CEO Binance wrote on Twitter:

"We are in contact with Nano team (re: Bitgrail) and will freeze deposits from identified addresses as we receive them. This is one reason we require coin CEO/founder to submit listing requests. Binance will assist where we can. We need to work together to protect users."

As predicted by experts, hacking exchanges and the disappearance of funds will continue this year. The first major similar incident in 2018 was the breaking of the Tokyo exchange Coincheck, with which in the middle of January, NEM was stolen by 530 million dollars. At the same time, the owners of the exchange promised the users to compensate most of the losses from their own funds.